OC3D Recommended System Builds

Rocky - The Pound-for-Pound Champion

The high-midrange, where everyone is desperate to get the very finest hardware possible for a price they can afford, is the most cut and thrust sector of any market at all. What we wanted to do was put together something which would blow your doors off in real-terms. A specification that demonstrates that price doesn't always equate to performance.

The basis for our Pound-for-Pound Champion is the outstanding i5-3570K, a CPU that overclocks like a nutter and has great stock performance too. It's kept cool with a Corsair H100i, and the MSI GD65 Gaming is full of features that will be useful to everyone from hardcore fraggers to dedicated movie buffs. With the push-button overclock available there is no excuse not to get the most from the Intel CPU. The Kingston Predator RAM is blisteringly fast, looks fantastic, and has the backup of the excellent Kingston support. With a Club3D HD7950 Royal King, a HD7970 for £80 less, all of your games will look lovely and run smoothly. With the wonderful Samsung 840 Pro pushing it along everything will load quickly too. It's all held in our favourite sensibly-sized case, the NZXT Switch 810 which means this system is ripe for an easy custom watercooling upgrade if and when funds allow.

£1090 on the nose, which for a system with this much potential is an absolute bargain. Whilst it's always a balance between price and performance, this is the specification we'd recommend to anybody except the most well-heeled. Other models might be higher up the hardware range and therefore look better in your signature, but for blazing performance in every single task, at a price that wont leave you living on beans and noodles, this is the one.

I visit this Dutch tech site where they do stuff like this monthly. I'm not asking you to do that, but since new hardware comes out all the time, maybe you guys can do this more often for those in need?

I personally think you left too big a gap between the first two though. You went from a 200r to a full tower, from a stock cooler to an H100i and from a low end card like the 650 Ti to a high-end 7950.

I visit this Dutch tech site where they do stuff like this monthly. I'm not asking you to do that, but since new hardware comes out all the time, maybe you guys can do this more often for those in need?

I personally think you left too big a gap between the first two though. You went from a 200r to a full tower, from a stock cooler to an H100i and from a low end card like the 650 Ti to a high-end 7950.

Other than that those are some nice builds.

Plans are a big update each quarter matey, no doubt we will update this again in a month or so

I dont think we left a gap really, you can buy a lot with an extra £500. Youll notice even the cheap rig had an SSD but the point was with that CPU it wont get hot so that cooler wont be loud. End of the day you cant have everything when you have to stick to a set budget so we chose what we deemed to be most important. All the rigs were designed to be able to be upgraded

Plans are a big update each quarter matey, no doubt we will update this again in a month or so

I dont think we left a gap really, you can buy a lot with an extra £500. Youll notice even the cheap rig had an SSD but the point was with that CPU it wont get hot so that cooler wont be loud. End of the day you cant have everything when you have to stick to a set budget so we chose what we deemed to be most important. All the rigs were designed to be able to be upgraded

Good point, but maybe it would be a good idea to add the extra pricepoint of 750 pounds next time? And is this really what you guys talk about in pubs?

Could have got the 500m for the £500 build and saved a tenner or so that could have gone on the CPU.
The H100i is complete overkill for what you could have got for money saved over it. The TX750 is overpowered too.
I like the aim of this piece though.

This I am sure will help many great stuff OC3D team and Tom keep up your great work all my support and gratitude. Cheers.

Being in North America I wish there some way to get Club cards I really like the performace and looks. Again I will link some people here when asked what I suggest for agree with your load outs on all levels.

I'd probably change the case and ram on the mid build to something a little smaller, maybe a arc midi 2? and stick some red ram in there to match the motherboard, should give a little extra to spend on the cpu or gpu Great basic outlines guys these will be very useful for first time builders

For Rocky I had to change the RAM and the Video card because the ones selected where not available I stayed with the Kingston RAM but went with the Sapphire 7950 over the Club3D. Price in the US £766.27.

Nice build suggestions. I'm honestly kind of shocked that that APU is still a bit cheaper than the FX 4300 in a lot of places, but I definitely like that they seem to be getting more attention these days in multiple rig configurations. When utilizing an APU based build what would you suggest as the strongest video card before the processor starts to limit performance too much for it to be worth it? Still trying to wrap my head around what in the APU/FX 4/6-core CPUs holds back video card performance. I get that L2 cache sizes are different, there are variances in clock speeds and obviously fewer "cores", but beyond that with the architecture being the same it's still hard for me to explain to people why these lower tier processors can hold back GPU and overall system performance. I just know that they do, and that the benchmarks will definitively show that to be true.

it was stated before. the apu should be changed with the athlon X4 750K if you want a dedicated gpu couse its the same cpu without igp+a ssd should not be in the budget build.get better cpu. all the psu`s have too much W for the components,there are better and quieter video cards...dominator platinums... i`m just not a fan ... donno its just my opinion. we can all build them in so different ways

it was stated before. the apu should be changed with the athlon X4 750K if you want a dedicated gpu couse its the same cpu without igp+a ssd should not be in the budget build.get better cpu. all the psu`s have too much W for the components,there are better and quieter video cards...dominator platinums... i`m just not a fan ... donno its just my opinion. we can all build them in so different ways

I gave up trying to please everyone year ago. Im not about to explain everything about above. Sadly thats why we write these things and you read them not understanding

Nice hope you do more of these, My only change would be the black dress system instead of the ssd getting a bigger hdd for storage as 64gb isn't practical for OS + games when you can get a 2TB hdd for the same money, I understand why you went with the SSD for performance speed.
Maybe even the rocky could go 64GB ssd and a storage drive, just the way I'd probably go

Looks like great basic builds. People, don't take these as a literal build that all must absolutely be followed. As far as the SSD in The Little Black Dress, I don't see a problem with it being that small. Mine is 60 Gig and I have everything on it I need on it. Everything else is installed to a mechanical hard drive. There are some things on my SSD that could be moved from it.

Looks like great basic builds. People, don't take these as a literal build that all must absolutely be followed. As far as the SSD in The Little Black Dress, I don't see a problem with it being that small. Mine is 60 Gig and I have everything on it I need on it. Everything else is installed to a mechanical hard drive. There are some things on my SSD that could be moved from it.

This was my point the build doesn't include a storage drive so to keep the price bracket you would need to replace it for a bigger mechanical hard drive or increase the price slightly

I'm surprised there are people saying they would forgo an SSD in the £500 build, an SSD would speed day to day tasks up more than any upgraded GPU or CPU would.

Also a lot of people seemed to have missed the point that these systems are designed with upgradability in mind, hence the larger than required PSUs (however agree that 1200W is a bit overkill but hey, £3k build is overkill I suppose)

Last point - Should have a build in about the £750 mark imo, it is where a lot of the market will be.

First off, very glad to see this, an excellent stopping point for people asking about this sort
of thing.

Quote:

Originally Posted by tinytomlogan

I gave up trying to please everyone year ago. Im not about to explain everything about above. Sadly thats why we write these things and you read them not understanding

The world we live in.

Quote:

Originally Posted by FredEx

People, don't take these as a literal build that all must absolutely be followed.

Exactly what I was thinking. Take these as a baseline and if you feel you need to change
something then do so without all the moaning. My take on these sorts of recommendations
is that they provide a good starting point for planning a build, and if you follow them you
should be able to be confident that you haven't made any egregious errors in component
choice. It's not that they're the only possible choice, but they are one possibility
which has been thought over by well-informed people.

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